Protecting Family and Race. The Progressive Case for Regulating Women's Work

摘要: I Introduction AMERICAN ECONOMICS BECAME a professional, expert policy discipline during the Progressive Era (roughly 1890-1920), period that marked, not coincidentally, beginning of vastly more expansive state relationship to economy. By World War I, U.S. government created Federal Reserve, amended Constitution institute personal income tax, established Trade Commission, applied antitrust laws industrial combinations and labor unions, restricted immigration, while governments regulated working conditions, banned child labor, instituted "mothers' pensions," capped hours, set minimum wages. (1) Professional economists, especially progressives among them, played leading role in transformation state's American What is less well known eugenic thought deeply influenced economics, like regulatory it helped found, came age at time when biological approaches social economic reform were their high-water mark. Reform-minded economists (and other scientists) argued force should be rid unfit workers--whom they labeled "unemployables," "parasites," "industrial residuum"--so as uplift superior, deserving workers. Immigrants, blacks, those deemed defective character or intellect regarded by legislation activists victims capitalism than threats health well-being workers society generally. Mostly neglected historians these invidious distinctions crucially informed immigration hallmark (Leonard 2003a). (2) This crude, eugenically sorting into undeserving classes was women well. Many reformers classified "unemployable." In United States, where nearly all exclusively, regulating women's work promoted for benefits obtain removed from paid employment. Leading progressives, them forefront reform, advocated excluding on grounds outside home threatened morals; usurped jobs rightly belonged male heads household entitled "family wage"; (3) improperly abandoned duties "mothers race." The progressive justifications diverse. Paternalists invoked health; moralists virtue; wagers" sought protect fathers competition women; "maternalists" virtues motherhood; eugenicists race. (4) But different shared two common characteristics: founded upon between sexes, better off are excluded II Influence Eugenic Thought BIOLOGY INFORMED PROGRESSIVE ERA science enough one cannot fully understand ideas underwrote without also understanding them. biology human inheritance remains relatively unexplored because, new scholarship notwithstanding, influence eugenics poorly understood. Eugenics still widely an aberrant, pseudoscientific, laissez-faire doctrine, 20th-century version Gilded Age Darwinism wholly after atrocities German National Socialism. …